Cancer has been the first leading cause of death globally for a long time and the patients suffering from cancer are increasing year by year. Therefore, the treatment of cancer is becoming an important topic. Cancer treatment can be divided into surgical treatment, radiation therapy, chemotherapy and targeted therapy.
Generally, the goal of cancer drug treatment, either chemotherapy or targeted therapy, is mainly to suppress the metastasis and expansion of cancer cells by inhibiting their replication and division.
Cancer drug design also aims at the development of a drug molecule having high specificity or at the design of a targeted antibody. According to statistical data, only about five drugs per ten thousand new drugs are able to access phase I clinical trials.
In addition to the problem of large-scale production of the drugs, other issues that still need to be overcome are drug safety, patient selection and testing dosage, etc. Even if the drug has been approved by the FDA and has been marketed, it is usually the case that a patient's response to the drug is not favorable. Furthermore, many cancer cells may start becoming resistant to the drug, which causes the significant reduction of efficacy of the drug, thereby resulting in failure of the cancer treatment. Therefore, there is a certain level of difficulty with regard to drug development.
Duloxetine hydrochloride (Duloxetine HCl) is a selective serotonin and norepinephrine reuptake inhibitor (SSNRI) for oral administration. The anti-depression mechanism of duloxetine in human bodies is unknown, but it is assumed that such mechanism is associated with the serotonergic and noradrenergic activities of duloxetine acting upon the central nervous system. Pre-clinical tests have shown that duloxetine can effectively block the reuptake of serotonin and norepinephrine, but merely slightly block the reuptake of dopamine. In vitro tests have shown that duloxetine has no significant affinity to dopaminergic, adrenergic, cholinergic or histaminergic receptors. Duloxetine does not inhibit monoamine oxidase. Duloxetine undergoes extensive metabolism, but it has not been found that the major circulating metabolites have significant pharmacologic activity of duloxetine. Duloxetine HCl has been approved by the FDA and there is a large amount of human research result data regarding Duloxetine HCl.
Due to the significant differences in clinical applications, duloxetine HCl has never been considered to have potential to inhibit cancer cells.